Day: February 13, 2010

The headphone remote for the third generation iPod shuffle has a special chip that identifies it to the iPod itself. [David Carne] posted an in-depth report about the process he used to reverse engineering that protocol. He’s discovered that the remote uses a peculiar signal to identify it as authentic when the device powers up. We’ve talked about Apple’s use of peripheral authorization before and it seems this is no different. [David] did manage to emulate the authentication using an ATmega88. If you’ve got a shuffle 3G sitting around this info will allow you to operate it with a microcontroller in your next project.

This arcade cabinet has been saved from a gruesome death. [Oldbitcollector] picked the broken rig up for $50 and is building a Parallax Propeller based arcade machine. This began back in October and he’s just dropped in a newly painted control panel to replace the NES controller seen above. He pulled the replacement screen out of an old 19″ TV and found it to be a perfect fit. We didn’t find a complete list of available games but we know he’s got a menu system to choose the game and have seen Donkey Kong, Frogger, Defender, and at least one other in the videos. There’s less choices than a MAME cabinet but who needs more than a handful of the old 8-bit gems anyway?

[Mtneer_man] has a workshop to die for. The slide show that he set up covers the different workbenches and shop setups that he’s had over the years. He’s got a core set of beliefs when it comes to his work area. He prefers to have several different work areas for varying degrees of dirty, greasy, stick, or precision projects. These are luxuries that most don’t have the opportunity to enjoy.

With a setup this nice and this clean it’s amazing he does any projects at all. Wait a sec,his workshop IS a hack. The more recent collections of his prolific Flickr sets he details the building and outfitting of yet another workshop in a new structure on his property. We’re going to keep our eyes on this and see where it ends up.